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Thursday, 29 March 2012

How to Install SQL Server 2008

How to Install SQL Server 2008

SQL Server 2008 is relatively easy to install, but it does take a little
knowledge of the process and a little planning. For most shops the planning
phase can be minimal but there will be instances (like clustering) when you’ll
need to plan quite a bit. This will not be one of those cases. Today we’re
going to discuss a straight-forward SQL Server 2008 install. Unlike some of the
other Microsoft products there are a lot of screens to go through when
installing SQL Server 2008, but most of them aren’t that bad. You just need to
know what choices to make.

First
of all you need to make sure your system meets the minimum requirements for the
version of SQL Server 2008 you’re installing.
Assuming that you’ll be installing this on a production system it’s important
to know that there is at least one system reboot required for this install.
That’s because the first thing this install will do is upgrade your version of
Windows Installer to 4.5. If you’ve already got Windows Installer 4.5 then
setup will not require the reboot. Next it will install version 3.5 of the .Net
framework. On most boxes this shouldn’t require a reboot. I tell you this
because if you’re installing SQL Server 2008 on a current production box that,
then you’ll need to plan ahead for the reboot and perhaps do it a few days
before you install SQL Server 2008 so you’ve got it out of the way when the time
comes.

Ok, now that we’ve taken care of the
preliminaries, let’s install SQL Server 2008.

The media will autorun and present you with this screen.

Notice how much info Microsoft gives you right away. Over on the left there
are menu choices and the options on the right change as you go through the
menus. You want to click on the Installation menu on the left
to be presented with this screen.
2. You can see there are many options here, but in this case the only one
that makes sense is to click the top option for a stand-alone install. Click
that option.
3. Once you choose the stand-alone install, setup will install the setup
support files. It does this every time you run the installer so don’t be
surprised if you run it again and again and it installs them every time. At
this point setup will also run some checks to make sure that your system is
ready to run through the install process. If it’s not and something fails,
you’ll see an error similar to the one below. In my case I have a reboot
pending and setup will not continue until I reboot.
If you don’t have any problems with the checks, the screen will be all green
like this:
I might also add that if you have to reboot, once your server comes back up
setup should continue on its own and re-run this check and if all errors have
been eliminated, it should present you with the above screen just as if there
had never been a problem.
4. Click OK. Next you will be presented with the setup support rules page.
This is another set of checks that tells you whether things will complete and
work properly once setup completes. The screen looks like this.
And again, warnings can be ok, but if there are any errors you’ll need to
resolve them before moving forward. I’ll talk more about the kinds of things
that can go wrong with setup in another article.
5. Now it’s time to choose the installation type. Are you installing a new
instance of SQL Server 2008, or adding to an existing instance?
6. Now enter your product key if you need to. There are times when it’ll
be filled in automatically for instance if you’re installing an MSDN
version.
7. Next you need to agree to the license terms. For the sake of completion
I’m going to go ahead and say that you should read all of the license terms so
you know what you’re agreeing to. However, assuming you agree and actually want
to install SQL Server 2008, then check the box and click next.
8. This is one of those really important parts of the installation:
choosing features to install. Unfortunately, since I don’t know your goal I
can’t really offer very much guidance here, but I can tell you that you’ll need
to install Database Engine Services at a minimum if you want to
run a SQL Server 2008 database on the server. Everything else is optional, but
it is a good idea to install the documentation and the management tools. If
you’re not sure whether you should install a feature or not there are two bits
of advice I can offer. First, as you click on each option, a description comes
up in the right pane that tells you what it’s all about so that can help you
decide. And second, installing everything won’t hurt your server so if you’re
not sure, then it’s cool to go with a full install. It’s still always best to
snipe the features you’re after though.
You’ll notice that some features are grayed out. This is because I’ve
already got SQL Server 2008 installed on my box, and some features can only be
installed once across all instances. It doesn’t do any good to install multiple
copies of the documentation, for example.

9. This next screen allows you
to define whether you want to install a default or a named instance. You can of
course only install one default instance, and all others must be named. As you
can see here, I’m installing a named instance because I’ve already got a default
instance on my box.
10. This screen outlines the disk space requirements for all the options
you’ve chosen. There’s nothing really to do here and I’ve never seen it fail
since nobody puts a database on a server that can’t even hold the install.
11. Now you need to configure your service accounts. You can select the
same account for all services or separate them into different accounts. And
while detailed advice on that is beyond the scope of this article, I can say
that either way is usually ok. The one piece of advice I can give you though is
to make it a domain account instead of just a local Windows account. And there
are special permissions that these accounts need so you should make sure they
have those rights.
12. This screen takes a little explanation. It’s asking you which security
model you want to run. It defaults to Windows authentication which should be
fine for most shops. The deciding factor is whether you’ve got non-windows
domains, or if you’ve got regular windows domains that don’t trust each other.
This could be a situation where you’ve got external customers hitting your
database and you don’t want to give them windows access, but rather access
through some sort of portal. All the same, it’s best to use Windows
authentication if your users have Windows accounts. It’s more secure and it’s
easier for the users to connect to the database. This screen also wants you to
define default data directories. You can change these at any time once SQL
Server 2008 is installed, so you can just accept the defaults here if you like
and then change it later if you need to.
13. This screen gets overlooked by a lot of people. It’s really a good
idea to check both of these boxes. There’s absolutely no personal or
identifying information sent to Microsoft and checking these boxes allows them
to get automatic error and usage information so they can improve the product.
And contrary to popular belief, they actually do look at every error report that
comes across. So check both of these. It costs you nothing and it helps
improve the product.
14. You’re going to learn to hate this screen. Here we have another set of
checks that can stop your install and in my experience, most of the stuff that’s
going to stop you will happen here… after you’ve already been through most of
the screens. This topic is too detailed to go into right now, but just know
that you can expect some showstoppers here if there are going to be any. The
good news is that you mostly get stopped on upgrade so if you’re installing a
fresh instance you’ll probably be ok. So once you get all greens you can go
ahead.

15. Assuming you’ve made it this far
you should be free to hit the Install button. There’s nothing
really notable about this screen; it’s just a summary of all the options you’ve
chosen. If you like you can look it over and to make sure that you didn’t do
anything stupid, but I’m usually ready to just start installing at this point so
I just bull on ahead.
OK, you’ve just gone through the setup wizard to install SQL Server 2008. As
you can see it’s fairly straight-forward but there are a lot of screens to click
through. This is a much bigger topic than I could ever cover in a single
article, but starting with a simple wizard-driven install is a good place to get
your feet wet.